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SXSW tackles the future of porn

AUSTIN — People with very strong puritan sensibilities may have a hard time with South by Southwest Interactive (and for that matter with the rest of this column). This famous confab for tech startups and big

AUSTIN — People with very strong puritan sensibilities may have a hard time with South by Southwest Interactive (and for that matter with the rest of this column). This famous confab for tech startups and big name speakers — Al Gore and Elon Musk were on the weekend lineup — is in other respects anything but G-rated.

Few topics appear to be taboo. The program description for a SXSW event titled "Naked Girls Reading" says it all. "There's something beautiful, something altogether intimate, about a women reading pretty much anything in her, well, altogether. It's just that plain simple. Girls reading. Naked."

Other topics covered, "Female Orgasm: The Regenerative Human Technology and the Open Source Sex Science & the PSIgasm Project."

Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn.com, headlined a well-attended session on the The Future of Porn, a serious and entertaining discussion on the state of her business and the adult industry in which she is part of, not all of which is appropriate to share here.

There's "a complete absence in society of an open, healthy, honest, truthful conversation around sex in the real world," Gallop explained to her SXSW audience. "Our entire mission at MakeLoveNotPorn.com boils down to talk about it. What I decided to do was to take every dynamic out there that exists in social media currently and apply this to the one area that no other social media network or platform has ever gone or will ever get to go which is sex. I want to socialize sex. I want to make 'real world sex' socially acceptable and therefore just as socially shareable as anything else we currently share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram."

Six months ago, Gallop and her team launched MakeLoveNotPorn.TV, which she describes as a "user-generated, crowdsourced platform where anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real world sex."

You do have to join, and it costs $5 per submission, which allows participants to watch the video as often as they'd like over a three-week period, after which there are rental fees. It costs $5 to watch other videos.

Through a revenue sharing model, those who have submitted videos get to keep half of the money generated from those who watch, Gallop says.

Videos are pre-screened before they are hosted at the site to make certain that they don't include anyone under age and that everyone in the video is a consenting adult. Moreover, each person appearing must submit two forms of ID each to ensure that they are who they say they are. But you can remain anonymous publicly.

"We're not going up against porn and we're not competing against porn," Gallop says. "We're doing something very different. 99.9% of all porn billed on the Internet as amateur isn't; it's made by professional production companies. We're not porn, we're not amateur, we're real world sex. Everybody wants to know what everybody else is doing in bed. And we are out to show you that real world sex is more innovative, more creative, more surprising, more hot and more arousing than porn could ever be."

The videos are meant to educate and reassure people, Gallop says, that the "same s**t happens to us." For examples, there might be videos on the awkward moments people have around condoms, and what Gallup refers to as "lazy person sex." "We want the sexual equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos," she says.

Membership at the site is evenly split among the genders.

Gallop says due to the nature of the business, she has struggled to get funding. "I should have been every VC's wet dream literally," she jokes. "I could not find a single bank here in America that would let me open a business bank account for a business that had the word 'porn' in the name. Our single biggest operational challenge have been putting our payments infrastructure in place. Because we are what the world deems `adult content' PayPal won't work with us, Amazon won't work with us, none of the mainstream payment processors will work with us."

During an interview, Gallop told me that she has no intention to relent and remove the word "porn" from the company name.

She also mentioned other entrepreneurs that are trying to build businesses in the space. Among them: Vibease, an Android vibrator app for couples in long distance relationships and Offbeatr, a "Kickstarter for adult projects."

Gallop says she would love to develop a mobile app, but says it's a fact of life that "the iTunes Store will never take us."